Moneen

The Red Tree

BY Sam SutherlandPublished May 1, 2006

It’s not entirely surprising, but the third full-length from Brampton, ON’s proudest sons is a work of passionate, inspired musicianship and genuine emotion, approaching the unbridled enthusiasm of Theory of Harmonial Value and easily surpassing the more pop-based songwriting of Are We Really Happy With Who We Are Right Now? The record almost entirely abandons the math rock breaks that have long been the band’s trademark, streamlining their sound without compromising their naturally aggressive approach. It’s apparent from the sonically enormous opener "Don’t Ever Tell Locke What He Can’t Do” that the band are writing music that, while not as musically complicated, may be some of the most compelling and appealing of their career. The sense of cohesion that holds together every song on The Red Tree goes above and beyond any of the band’s previous work, and combined with the beautiful artwork, it is apparent that they have poured themselves into making something that is built to rise above the emo din. With a newfound focus on powerful songwriting, the record’s lyrics are light years ahead of anything the band have ever done, and while some may miss the mathematic Moneen of yore, the mature Moneen of today have just as much to offer.

What was so gruelling about the creation of this particular record? Vocalist/guitarist Kenny Bridges: We didn’t want to push ourselves to do something quick just to get it done. It went in lots of different stages, from high productivity levels to us just full-on procrastinating, to writing the hell out of these songs and then recording them, re-writing them, re-demoing them, recording them again; it got really intense. If we had recorded when we first had our demos done, it would have been a completely terrible record with all these space jams that made no sense, and songs about nothing. It was about six or seven months into the whole process that it all started to come together.

Is there a song that turned out completely different than you anticipated? The one Hippy [Hughes, guitarist/vocalist] song, "Seasons Fade… something something.” I don’t know the titles to our songs. We have jam titles for all our songs, though, and the jam title for that one was "Papa Hip” because when Hippy originally brought it in, it actually sounded like Papa Roach. There was this riff, and we just went along with it, but after I was like, "Dude, this shit has got to go.” We completely re-wrote the second half of it. Every song has to grow.
(Vagrant)

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